Inheritance

As you may have guessed, Italy is filled with cultural inheritance.  It’s not just the architecture that’s thousands of years old, it’s also traditions.  Some are wonderful–like the one we attended a few days ago in Alezio.  The oldest living person in the family, the grandmother, sat in her wheelchair on the side of the street in the evening in this small town while all of the relatives came, one by one, to greet her, give her a kiss and express their honor for her.  It brought me to tears.  What have we lost in our rush toward bigger and better everything!

Some traditions are quite funny–serious for the participants but humorous for outsiders like us.  Here is a billboard outside of Alezio announcing the night when the whole city performs an exorcism to keep away the biting spider, a legend that has survived for hundreds of years.  Religious exorcisms for events that happened centuries ago remind us how little we have really traveled in our beliefs.  I just thought you might reflect on the things we do that parallel these ancient rites.